[OSM-talk] Can you recommend good introduction to JOSM for 100% osm newbie?

[Andy Townsend]

On 05/10/2020 08:57, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:
>
> sent from a phone
>
>> On 5. Oct 2020, at 00:58, Michael Booth <boothym at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Not sure I'd recommend JOSM for a 100% OSM newbie unless there was a specific reason or feature required when editing.
>
> I would, because they will have to learn from scratch anyway, so why not starting with the most popular (by numbers of edits), most powerful, most versatile, closest to the community consensus and longest standing (i.e. most reliable that it will remain) editor?

Telling potential new contributors that they need to use JOSM to 
contribute to OSM will have two effects:

 1. It'll put lots of people off contributing to OSM at all.
 2. It'll cause lots of errors in OSM where people don't understand what
    they're doing do things by accident.

All tools have their strengths and weaknesses and it makes sense to use 
the right tool for the job in each case.  JOSM is great for some things 
- I regularly use 4 different OSM editors on a regular basis and by some 
measure of "most edits" JOSM may well be "the editor that I use most", 
but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't familiar with the basics 
in OSM at all yet.  People need to find out how "what they see in the 
real world" and "what they see on a map" relate to "what data is 
actually in OSM" and JOSM really isn't good at explaining, or in some 
cases even representing, that.

Best Regards,

Andy

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20201005/b2a238f4/attachment.htm>